The Bartender
A Fable about a Journey
Michael McNichols
THE BARTENDER
A Fable about a Journey
Copyright © 2008 Michael McNichols. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.
Wipf & Stock
A Division of Wipf and Stock Publishers
199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3
Eugene, OR 97401
ISBN 13: 978-1-55635-827-2
EISBN 13: 978-1-4982-7454-8
Manufactured in the U.S.A.
All scripture references, unless otherwise noted, are from the New Revised Standard Version.
Dedicated to all those who thirst to proclaim and demonstrate the reality of the Kingdom of God; and to all those who thirst to receive it.
Prologue
Do nothing without deliberation,but when you have acted, do not regret it.
Sirach 32:19
It is an awful thing to regret one’s own life. A person need not be old to carry such regrets. All that is needed is the awareness of the accumulation of wrong turns and poor choices accompanied by the shuddering realization that hope has been lost.
People who lack religious affinities can embrace regret once they recognize that something is horribly wrong with the world and there is no solution to be found. These people might become open to a new search for meaning in life or they might look for the desperate courage to extinguish their own lives in order to eliminate the pain of hopelessness.
Religious people can also embrace regret. Those identifying themselves as Christians—followers of Jesus—are just as vulnerable to the pain of regret as are other human beings. It would seem that Christians might be the brokers of hope, since they seem to hope for heaven after death, hope for a better life before death, and hope that the lives of other people might find meaning and peace with God.
Yet, Christian people still embrace regret and often lose hope. Their reasons differ from the non-religious types in that they do believe there is a solution to the wrongs of the world and that the solution is to be found in Jesus the Christ. Even while believing that, however, they often fear that the paths they have chosen in life have turned out to be outside of God’s true preferences. They sometimes fear that God has always had a perfect plan if only the faithful will remain sufficiently devout to find that plan. They cry, “Your will be done!” only to puzzle over what that will might be. God begins to emerge as the astonished and secretive parent, watching the errant child wander (often in good faith!) through life, getting everything wrong. It seems to be only when it is too late that God reveals the irreversible truth that God’s will has been missed. The liberating claim, “God is light” now morphs into the dark epitaph, God is deceptive.
Those for whom faith and hope in God remain elusive, regrets become grounded in personal failure. The misguided conclusion might then be drawn that God rejects those who fail.
Those who have found their faith coming alive as they have trusted themselves to Jesus might find regrets that are grounded in disillusionment. They would not cry, “God is dead!” but, rather, Jesus, what the Bible says about you just doesn’t work.
This is a story about regrets.
1
I saw all the deeds that are done under the sun; and see, all is vanity and a chasing after wind.
Ecclesiastes 1:14
In the mind of Paul Philips it seemed like a noble act to start up a new church. It was risky, it was bold—and it was probably insane.
Music City Community Church seemed, at first, like an honorable endeavor. As part of a larger association of churches, it shared with those churches values such as authenticity in worship and style, cultural relevance, and openness to all who would come. The church even attempted to relate to the local community by adopting a name that linked it with the long-standing history of music and art development that characterized the city. It was also grounded in a form of Christian evangelical orthodoxy that put Music City (as the church was commonly nicknamed) in a very respectable tradition.
Paul founded and pastored this church, launching out with a desperate hope that this new little faith community would truly make a difference in the lives of people who had given up on God. He’d read a dozen books on church growth and studied the statistics about how often people move from one church to another (“transfer growth” is what they called it). Paul was distressed to learn that most of what passed for church growth was actually this kind of transference. He would frequently hear of a new church that had grown rapidly, giving the impression that the local atheists and agnostics had finally found what they were always looking for. In the end the truth would unfold: The new churches were typically growing at the expense of the other churches in the community. For Paul, this was a form of spiritual misrepresentation. He felt like the church landscape was cluttered with facades that advertised new life only to offer recycled existence.
Paul was not interested in starting up another venue that gave people the opportunity to move from one church building to another. His hope was that this church would be different. He longed for a church that would seek to touch the lives of people disenfranchised from church and, by implication, from God. This church would seek to reach out to those who lived their lives as though God did not exist. This church would proclaim and demonstrate the good news of Jesus Christ.
And, ten years later, the church looked almost nothing like what he had imagined.
Even in his disappointment, Paul recognized that this was not a bad church. It was made up of people who were committed to being involved not only as members but also as workers and leaders. The people truly seemed to care for one another. He was grateful that they weren’t religious phonies or, as his dad used to say, “Bible-thumping crazies.” They were real people learning to follow Jesus. He was thankful for that. He was also thankful that they were people who could put up with him. He seemed to hover around the edges of respectability, never quite leaking past the margins of propriety but often willing to move the boundary markers. Paul liked to think it was his visionary wiring that made him this way. His wife claimed it was because he was natural-born agitator.
While Paul appreciated the congregation’s faithfulness in corporate worship, he also occasionally stopped to identify the hidden radicals and subversives of his church. He thought of Louise Simmons, a grandmother who worked in the library of a local community college. She was conservative and quiet, yet when one of the student workers was diagnosed with AIDS, she met with him weekly to console and pray with this young man until the day of his death. There was Roger Davis, a middle-aged, recovered alcoholic who volunteered to lead a twelve-step group each week in one of Music City’s meeting rooms. And, of course, there were the kids in the high school group who faithfully traveled down to Mexico twice a year to help at the orphanage that the church helped to sponsor. Yes, Music City had plenty of people who sincerely desired to trust their lives to Jesus and to follow him into some fairly challenging places.
But most of the people of the church were Christians the day they showed up at Music City. They had church backgrounds. They had good reasons for coming to this new church but they were, for the most part, seasoned veterans of the faith. There were a small number who had gone through very difficult life circumstances, had given up on God, and then found new life through an invitation to the church. They seemed to hope that they could like God again. That was something to celebrate.
At the same